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arXiv · 2510.14755

Impact of rotation on a cold atom interferometer and compensation strategy

Noémie Marquet·Yannick Bidel·Malo Cadoret·Alexis Bonnin·Sylvain Schwartz·Phuong-Anh Huynh·Alexandre Bresson·Antoine Godard·Franck Pereira Dos Santos·Olivier Carraz·Nassim Zahzam
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Abstract

Rotations play a detrimental role in achieving ultra-high-performance inertial measurements with an atom interferometer, leading potentially to a total loss of interference contrast and the emergence of dominant phase shift biases. This becomes particularly significant when considering operation in dynamic conditions such as those encountered in Earth orbiting satellites in the perspective of future space gravity missions on-boarding a cold atom accelerometer. We study in this context the impact of rotation on the phase shift and contrast of an atom interferometer and investigate mitigation strategies. An analytical model is derived and compared to experimental demonstrations carried out using an original setup in which the well-controlled proof-mass of a space electrostatic accelerometer is used as the retro-reflection mirror of a cold atom gravimeter. By properly counter-rotating the electrostatic proof-mass, we demonstrate for instance the possibility of recovering the interferometer contrast, otherwise equal to zero, to a level better than 90%, in both cases of constant angular velocities or in presence of angular accelerations. Our results demonstrate the possibility to perform high performance inertial measurements with a cold atom interferometer in a challenging environments.

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Noémie Marquet, Yannick Bidel, Malo Cadoret, Alexis Bonnin, Sylvain Schwartz, Phuong-Anh Huynh, Alexandre Bresson, Antoine Godard, Franck Pereira Dos Santos, Olivier Carraz, Nassim Zahzam. 2025-10-16. Impact of rotation on a cold atom interferometer and compensation strategy. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14755

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